Megalomaniac vision: CI is everywhere, all the time

Ambient links together build workers and development projects to provide a CI system that just is there, all the time, everywhere. Anyone can provide a worker that anyone can use. The system constrains build jobs so that they can only do safe things, and can only use an acceptable amount of resources, and guarantees that the output of the build can be trusted.

(This may be impossible to achieve, but we can dream. If you don’t aim for the stars you are at risk of shooting yourself in the foot.)

Plausible vision: CI is easy to provide and use

The various components of Ambient are easy to set up, and to keep running, and to use. Within an organization it’s easy to access. It’s so easy provide a worker on one’s own machine, without worry, that everyone in the organization can be expected to do so. Builds can easily be reproduced locally.

Realistic vision

Ambient provides a command line tool to run a job in a safe, secure manner that is easily reproduced by different people, to allow collaborating on a software development project in a controlled way. (Some of this works now.)